Forty years ago this month, a young man named Mario Savio, 21 years old, climbed on top of a car in Berkeley, Calif., and let fly with a stream of incendiary rhetoric, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born.

            I'll skip the next chapters and go straight to "forty years later," meaning Oct. 7, 2004, when a fellow two years older than Savio would have been if he hadn't keeled over a few years ago, clambered onto a chair at the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, right outside the entry to the University of California at Berkeley and let fly with a stream of rhetoric that would have been a lot more incendiary for the crowds in Sproul Plaza if Lenni Brenner had remembered to bring a bullhorn.

            These days, the Free Speech Movement is comfortably, maybe too comfortably, installed on the Berkeley calendar as an annual event where FSM veterans look back on the Sixties (initial phase), hold panels on such topics as -- I'm quoting from the Fortieth Anniversary program, which stretched across four days -- on "the FSM: Its Genesis, Meanings and Consequences" and seek to hector youth for their lack of revolutionary zeal.

This week, Sinclair Broadcasting, the largest owner of local television stations in the U.S., ordered its 62 stations to preempt regular programming to air an anti-Kerry documentary just a few days before the election.

Sinclair's mission is clear: sway the election in favor of an administration that lets companies like Sinclair get even bigger. It's great for Sinclair's bottom line — terrible for our democracy.

This is not about 'liberal' or 'conservative.' It's about corruption, the threat to democratic discourse, and the manipulation of elections. Together, we can stop them.

Stop Sinclair: http://freepress.net/sinclair/

I grew up watching the antics of the famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wooden companion, Charlie McCarthy. The world has now been treated to a performance by their successors, Edgar Rove and Charlie McBush.

There is substantial and growing evidence that President Bush was “wired”, and receiving transmitted answers to questions he was asked during his first debate with Senator John Kerry. And CNN picked up the transmission of words to President Bush immediately before he spoke those very words at a D-Day event in France this year. It is unclear why the mainstream press did not pursue the matter at that time.

Once again, the hatred and lies of free press reaches hilarious proportions. Kerry got absolutely punked on Friday. However, he did do one thing right: He didn't take your advice to demand Bush's resignation. He would have been laughed off the stage. The bong-gurgling anarchists would have cheered, but so what? Besides, Kerry is on the record as saying he believed Saddam had WMD's. Ah, when Bush gets re-elected, we will all be giving the Bush-haters in America the bird. And if Airhead America's Randi Rhodes is unhappy with Bush's re-election, she can go whizz on a Christmas tree like she did 5 years ago.

Recently, Dov Weisglass, the Prime Minister Sharon's bureau chief said, "The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with the Palestinians… effectively this whole package called a Palestinian state has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

Mr. Weisglass, as Sharon's chief bureaucrat, who meets regularly with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and other international dignitaries simply confirms what Sharon has been saying publicly within Israel for several months now. The peace is dead, and Israel will continue to act unilaterally in the face of international pressure and with the full support of the U.S.

And so on it goes. As the Gaza massacre by the IDF precipitated by Qassam rocket fire meant over 90 dead, as Israeli tourists were bombed in the Sinai peninsula, and the American Vice Presidential debate confirming that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of Israel and Palestine, this will certainly embolden the Sharon government to continue a unilateral policy until